Peace Demonstrations that Prevent Peace – Extended Version

By CrisHam, 13 July, 2025

Members of today's peace movements are unaware of how far they have allowed themselves to be pushed away from a truly peacemaking path. Above all, due to a lack of background knowledge, they are unaware of the extent to which false friendship, pretexts, business interests, intrigue, and betrayal almost always represent the true causes of war.1)

However, the French writer and peace activist Victor Hugo had already developed a constructive concept against this insincere polarization of militarists over 175 years ago. At the Paris Peace Congress of 1849, he presented his magnificent vision – the creation of the United States of Europe as a democratic republic. This integration plan was modeled on the then rapidly rising United States, where immigrants from all European nations became Americans within two to three generations.

The implementation of this idea would have spared the cultural continent two world wars and much further bloodshed. By including Russia as an integral part of the concept, there would have been no October Revolution of 1917 and no later arms race during the Cold War.

The EU should have implemented the initiative at the latest. But the sparse integrative approaches, such as the elimination of internal tariffs, are countered by disintegrative tendencies. This applies in particular to a policy of appeasement towards the Islamic world, to which rampant migration movements and the growth of integration-resistant parallel societies in Europe have been permitted. This policy contradicts the EU Treaty, whose preamble expresses the desire to "strengthen solidarity among their peoples (those of the Union), with respect for their history, their culture and their traditions." The same contradiction to the integrative spirit of the EU Treaty (as of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act) also applies to the polarizing, exclusionary treatment of post-Soviet Russia in the run-up to the Ukraine War.

The roots of this new European war can be traced back to the devastating historical turn which militarists without sense of European solidarity had brought about only four years after Victor Hugo's initiative at the Paris Peace Conference.

In 1853, Great Britain and France intervened in one of the regional conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and Russia, siding with the Turks. The stubbornly escalated war cost 1 million lives. If at least this blood toll had been understood as a final warning, the European nations would not be facing each other again in a war between themselves in Ukraine.

A similar lack of solidarity has also numbed politicians in the European, i.e., Judeo-Christian, cultural sphere to the breach of treaties and defamation to which Jews have been exposed in their ancestral homeland of Palestine since the end of World War I. A major blind spot in political awareness is the fact that the Arabs, through their liberation from 400 years of Turkish rule, were amply compensated for Palestine—which, of course, was also occupied by the Turks.

Decades of persistent distortion of Israel's legal position2) have created a 'moral' environment in which support for never-ending Palestinian terrorism has become socially acceptable in the West. The instigation of hostilities in peacetime and the deliberate killing of civilians are undoubtedly identifiable as most serious war crimes, making any civilized coexistence impossible. According to Article 24 of the UN Charter, the UN Security Council was and remains responsible for decisively combating terrorism, but it has evaded this task since its beginnings in the late 1960s.

Those who blame Israel for Palestinian civilian casualties fail to answer the question of how the Jewish state should behave toward Islamists, who continually shell it from densely populated areas. It is obvious who is irresponsibly exposing civilians to the particular dangers of urban warfare instead of engaging in open combat from purely military combat positions.

Lack of solidarity among political leaders toward their own citizens is generally a vastly underestimated phenomenon. It also played and continues to play a decisive role in Iran.

Before the overthrow of the Shah's government in 1979, the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini lived in exile in France. There, he was provided with high-profile contacts, both with American President Jimmy Carter3) and with the British broadcaster BBC.4) The latter rigidly modified its Persian language broadcasts to a pro-Khomeini position and set a program in Iran in which the Aytollah could promote an Islamic republic.

After the coup, the 'Republic' emerged for Iranians as a dictatorship of the Supreme Leader, and Khomeini as a polarizing extremist who led the country on a collision course with the US and Israel. His successor, Ali Khamenei, has continued this kamikaze course and the promotion of terrorism since 1989.

All of these are the consequences of the irresponsible Western installation of Khomeini, a fanatic who unhesitatingly sacrificed the security and well-being of Iranians to his extremist visions. As was clear to his sponsors,1) this programe domestically meant the imposition of Islamic supremacy in state affairs - the opposite of the reform of Islam necessary to establish its compatibility with liberal civilization. In its foreign policy ambitions, Iran, under Ayatollah rule, is placed entirely at the service of global Islamic expansion and dominance.

On the issue of the nuclear program, the current democratically elected President Pezeshkian bowed to the tough stance of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, against his own convictions.

Those unfamiliar with this background, which is presented most incompletely in the mainstream media, are easily tempted to react to the Israeli military strike in June 2025 by participating in protest marches. However, these protests unitentionally send signals that thwart peaceful solutions.

To the idealistically motivated participants, who are almost never familiar with Israel's actual history,5) the demand for an arms embargo appears to be conducive to peace. However, they fail to recognize that their one-sided partisanship undermines the respect for the West which the short, hard US strike wrested from the Ayatollah regime. This respect had been denied by the autocrats for decades, when they sponsored large-scale terrorism, thereby transforming peacetime into incessant war and Iran into a rogue state.

The counterproductivity of the rallies is especially evident when posters (large-format and distributed in huge numbers) bearing the image of dictator Khamenei are presented. As a result, the moderate President Pezeshkian6) is losing domestic political clout, and the current chance for a democratic liberation7) of Iran is dwindling.

While criticism of the premature nature of the Israeli military operation from June 13 to 24, 2025, is justified, it was provoked for decades by the Ayatollah regime through its policy of relentless terror against Israel and Houthi piracy. Participants in peace demonstrations act counterproductively from the moment they provide ‚moral‘ support to the autocratic regime in Tehran. This partisanship is especially counterproductive for Iranians, the majority of whom favor reconciliation with the West and oppose the paternalism of the Islamists who have turned Iran into a rogue state.

The mainstream media, which has withheld basic information from the public for decades, both about Palestine/Israel and about Western manipulation in favor of Iranian (and other) Islamists, bears no small part of the blame for the misprogramming of the demonstrations. Further guilt is now being added by pushing these misprogrammed demonstrations.

An internet search using the keyword "Hands off Iran!" or the Spanish version "¡Manos fuera de Irán!" yields a very large number of results. These demonstrate a concerted nature (via the major news agencies) of the counterproductive ‘peace’ rallies. Politically motivated NGOs, which in turn depend on funding from wealthy foundations, are easily identified as the promoters of the parallel protest marches.8)

Before June 13, 2025, demonstrations under the slogan "Hands off Iran" – without Khamenei's portrait – would have been appropriate, as they could have prevented hasty Israeli politicians from falling into the trap of military confrontation long set by unsolidary Western polarizers. As in the Gaza War, the Jewish state is largely defenseless against a media-wide propaganda tsunami. But only when people realize that the entire Judeo-Christian cultural sphere is exposed to a war by all means will there be hope for its future in freedom.

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